As your partner in technology, Century is sharing this recent news in hopes to prevent cybersecurity mistakes. Many small and mid-sized companies use Intuit’s popular QuickBooks program. They usually start out using its easy-to-use base accounting program and then the QuickBooks program aggressively pushes other complimentary features. One of those add-on features is the ability to send customers’ invoices via email.
The payee can click on a “Review and pay” button in the email to pay the invoice. It used to be a free, but less mature, feature years ago, but these days, it costs extra. Still, if you are using QuickBooks for your accounting, the ability to generate, send, receive and electronically track invoices all in one place is a pretty easy sell.
Unfortunately, phishing criminals are using QuickBooks’ popularity to send business email compromise (BEC) scams. The emails appear as if they are coming from a legitimate vendor using QuickBooks, but if the potential victim takes the bait, the invoice they pay will be to the scammer.
Worse, the payment request can require that the payee use ACH (automated clearing house) method, which requires the payee to input their bank account details. So, if the victim falls for the scam, the criminal now has their bank account information. Not good.
Note: Some other QuickBooks scam warnings will tell you that QuickBooks will never ask for your ACH or banking details. This is not completely true. QuickBooks, the company and its support staff, never will, but QuickBooks email payment requests often do. Warn your users in Accounting.
CONTINUED at the KnowBe4 blog with both legit and malicious example screenshots: https://blog.knowbe4.com/beware-of-quickbooks-payment-scams
